Chapter : 1325

Crystalline blue wings, each one a magnificent, ten-foot-long structure of shimmering, clear ice that seemed to have been carved from the very heart of a frozen galaxy, burst from his back. They were not wings of feather or flesh, but of pure, solid magic. They shed a faint, sparkling dust of pure, absolute frost with every tiny movement.

Two sharp horns of dark, glacial ice, the color of the deepest, oldest parts of a glacier that had never seen the sun, grew from his head. They were a crown of winter’s anger.

His practical, dark brown hair, the hair of a simple professor, turned a brilliant, glowing silver-white. Each strand crackled with a faint, contained aura of blue light.

And his eyes… his eyes were no longer the warm, intelligent brown of a man. They were the cold, ancient, and utterly merciless melted gold of the dragon. They burned with a light that seemed to come from the very heart of a dying, frozen star.

He was no longer Lord Ferrum. He was the Winter King.

“You wanted my full power, Jager,” the new being declared. His voice was a strange, beautiful, and terrifying double sound, a perfect, chilling harmony of Lloyd’s own deep voice and the high, clear, cracking sound of a glacier breaking apart. “You should have been more specific in your wish.”

Jager stared. His arrogant smile was frozen on his face, a perfect, beautiful, and completely funny mask of pure, absolute, and soul-crushing terror. The math of the fight, which had seemed so brutally simple a moment ago, had just been rewritten. He had trapped himself not with a Commander, but with a god. And the cage he had been so confident in had just become his own, very private, and very cold, tomb.

The silence that fell over the white emptiness was a new and terrible thing. It was no longer the neutral, clean absence of sound. It was an active, attacking silence, the deep, soul-level quiet of a world that had been instantly frozen to its very center. Every particle was locked in a state of perfect, crystal stillness. Jager, who a moment ago was a master hunter, the clear king of his own private hunting ground, was now a statue. He was a monument to his own disastrously wrong calculation.

His mind, the brilliant, arrogant, and brutally efficient engine of a master assassin, had stopped working. It was a complete failure, a flood of a thousand error messages all screaming the same, impossible truth. The being in front of him broke the basic rules of his world. He was a living contradiction. A man who wore a dragon’s power like a second skin, a perfect combination of human flesh and god-like, elemental ice. The spiritual pressure coming from this… thing… was not a simple wave of power. It was a basic, and permanent, change in the rules of this pocket dimension. The clean, neutral space was no longer neutral. It was a frozen wasteland, a glacier, a kingdom of absolute zero. And the man with the wings of frozen starlight was its unquestioned, absolute, and merciless king.

Kroth, the King-Rank iron alligator, let out a low, deep growl. The sound was not one of attack, but of raw, basic, and instinctual fear. The parasitic, soul-draining energy that was its main weapon, a power that fed on the warmth and chaos of life, was being choked. Its corrupting, decaying heat was being put out by the all-consuming, conceptual cold that now defined this new reality. The alligator, a creature of decay and death, was in a world where nothing could die because nothing was truly alive. It was a fish drowning in the air.

Lloyd, the Winter King, took a single, slow, and unstoppable step forward. The sound was not the soft footstep of a man. It was the sharp, clear, and world-breaking crack of a glacier. The sound seemed to echo in the very bones of Jager’s soul.

“You spoke of math, Jager,” the Winter King’s dual voice echoed, a beautiful, terrifying harmony that was both a whisper and a roar. “Let us continue the lesson. Your spirit is a creature of decay. A parasite that feeds on the warmth of chaos and the friction of life. A fundamentally broken design.”

Jager’s training, the iron self-control that had been beaten into him since he was a child, finally, desperately, started to work. It was a final, useless act of resistance against the approaching, absolute terror. He would not die cowering. He was a King-Rank assassin, a prince of the Seventh Circle.

“Kroth!” he roared, his voice a rough, desperate, and pathetic thing. “Eat him! Rip the soul from his bones!”

Chapter : 1326

The iron alligator, driven by the last, desperate command of its master, threw itself forward. It was a twenty-foot-long, multi-ton missile of pure, parasitic hunger and absolute decay. Its huge jaws, which could crush a fortress gate and drain a spirit’s core in a single, destructive bite, opened wide. It was a doorway to a hell of spiritual destruction.

The Winter King did not move. He did not raise a shield. He did not prepare to fight back. He simply watched the creature’s attack with a look of deep, almost pitying, boredom.

As the alligator’s jaws, filled with teeth of sharpened, soul-draining iron, were about to snap shut on him, a perfect, life-sized, and incredibly detailed copy of himself appeared a few feet in front of him. It was not a clumsy illusion. It was a flawless statue of pure, clear, and beautiful ice. And it had the exact same expression of bored, scientific interest as the one who made it.

Kroth’s jaws closed on the decoy.

For a single, silent, and disastrous moment, its parasitic power surged. It was a wave of pure, decaying energy designed to eat the life force, the spiritual essence, the very soul of its target.

But there was no life to eat. There was no spirit to drain. There was only cold. An absolute, perfect, conceptual, and unforgiving cold.

The effect was instant. The soul-draining energy, with no warmth to consume, no chaos to feed on, turned in on itself. It was a fire that had been starved of oxygen, and it collapsed inward with a silent, disastrous violence.

A wave of brilliant, white frost burst from the point of contact. It was a silent, blooming flower of absolute zero that raced up the alligator’s snout. Its iron scales, which could withstand a direct hit from a war machine, became as fragile as thin glass. A beautiful, complex, and terrifying network of crystal-like cracks spread across its entire body in the space of a single, silent heartbeat.

And then, with a soft, melodic, and deeply musical chime that was the most terrifying sound Jager had ever heard, the King-Rank spirit, the masterpiece of corruption that had been his partner, his greatest weapon, and the other half of his soul, shattered.

It did not explode. It did not bleed. It simply… fell apart. It disintegrated into a billion tiny, sparkling specks of frozen, black dust. It was a beautiful, silent, and completely final death. The specks hung in the clean air for a moment, a ghostly after-image of the magnificent beast, before slowly, gently, drifting to the perfect white floor. It was a final, quiet proof of its absolute and total erasure.

Jager screamed. It was not a roar of anger or a cry of defiance. It was a raw, animal, and soul-deep sound of pure, complete agony. The mental shock of his spirit’s destruction hit him with the force of a physical blow. He fell to his knees, his hands grabbing his head. A thick, dark stream of blood poured from his nose, his ears, and his very eyes. His greatest weapon, his partner, his very soul, had been unmade.

The Winter King stood over him, a magnificent, terrifying, and utterly merciless god of winter. His golden, dragon-like eyes held no pity, no anger, no victory. There was only the cold, emotionless, and steady light of a distant, dying star.

“The math, Jager,” the Winter King whispered, his voice the sound of a gathering blizzard that was preparing to wipe the world clean. “Is, as I said, brutally simple.”

The execution had begun. And the symphony of absolute zero was only just reaching its first, beautiful, and terrible high point.

The dying scream of a powerful spirit was a terrible and beautiful thing. It was a silent shriek that was not heard with the ears, but felt deep inside Jager’s bones. It was a sound of pure, complete pain. It was the last, desperate cry of a being that was not just killed, but completely erased. Jager fell to his knees on the clean white floor. His body shook wildly and he could not control it. These were the aftershocks from his spirit being destroyed. The smart, proud master killer, the man who saw himself as a wolf among sheep, was now just a broken, crying animal. His mind was a wreck of broken thoughts and loud, empty noise.